Frequently Asked Questions

Here are some frequently asked questions about Recca, along with our answers. If there's anything else you'd like to learn about us, you can send us a message at [email protected]

How does Recca work?

At its core, Recca makes it easy to ask for and receive recommendations which answer specific, free-form questions across a wide variety of different categories.

Let's say you're looking for the best wheelchair-accessible sushi restaurant in San Francisco with a view of the Golden Gate Bridge. Or maybe the best podcast to listen to on a long road trip with your significant other's parents. Or maybe the best mattress under $1000 for side sleepers who easily overheat at night.

Our goal for Recca is to help people find things that solve their exact, personal questions, and to in turn let them share their knowledge with the community by recommending things that they know and love.

How do I get recommendations?

You can ask for practically any recommendation by creating a “prompt” on the website (by logging in and tapping “Create a Prompt” under your avatar in the header). Once the prompt is created, you can either share a link with your contacts or rely on the wider Recca community and your followers on the platform, who will see your prompts and chime in with their own answers.

For quicker results, consider browsing our existing prompts to see if what you're looking for has already been answered (tap “Categories” in the header).

Prompts on Recca stay open to answers, so you can continue to get recommendations and stay updated by “watching” prompts that you (or others) have created. To save you time, we generate leaderboards for every prompt, which will tell you the most common answers. You can also filter leaderboards to see only what the people you follow recommend.

Is it easy to add my own recommendations?

Yes!

Answering a prompt with a recommendation is generally as simple as typing the name of what you want to recommend. We're integrated with a ton of data sources like The Movie Database, Spotify, YouTube, and Google Maps, which lets you get right to the meat of the recommendation – a quick comment about why you think it's the best answer to the prompt.

By adding recommendations and watching prompts, you'll build out your user profile, which serves as a repository of everything you love and everything you're looking for. Easily filter, sort, and share anything on your profile. For example, if I want to send my San Francisco restaurant recommendations to a friend visiting town, my url looks like recca.co/@dan/sf/restaurants.

What types of recommendations do you support?

We already support a broad set of categories, and are continuing to add to them. Current categories include:

• For Entertainment: Music, TV & Movies, YouTube, Podcasts & Audiobooks, and Video Games
• For Local Places & Businesses: Anything with a physical location that a user might want to recommend (think restaurants, businesses, schools, parks, etc.). We're featuring four cities to start (Boston, LA, SF, NYC), but you can ask for and give recommendations for any city or state in the world.
• For Shopping @ Amazon.com: Any product that you might buy on Amazon. We've developed an initial set of categories to organize Amazon's offerings by area of interest/expertise.
• For Brands & Companies: Practically any brand or company that exists in the world. Our search is powered by Brandfetch.com, and they work hard to keep their database complete and up-to-date.

What makes Recca different from Yelp and other review sites?

Recommendations are fundamentally different from reviews. Reviews generally cover a single, specific experience that an individual had with a product, place, or business. Recommendations, on the other hand, answer a specific question and are usually only given by people with deeper knowledge and love for what they're recommending.

Here are some other notable differences:

• Recommendations are more useful than reviews – Every “recc” on Recca answers a purpose-driven prompt, and each user can only give one recc per prompt, so there's no wasted time on middling reviews. If a product or business isn't someone's favorite choice, it doesn't even warrant a listing. If you've heard the phrase “shut up and play the hits”, that's kind of our whole deal.
• Recommendations build relationships between people – Recca drives deeper social connections than Yelp and other review sites. The things that we love and recommend tell a story about ourselves in a more meaningful way than a one-off restaurant or product review. Learn about the products your friends use in their own homes, and be the friend that gives a great recc when you see that someone is watching a prompt.
• We cover more than just a small set of categories – Most people use Yelp for home services and restaurants. Other review sites tend to only focus on one or a few categories. But Recca encompasses every way that people can spend their time and money. What movies do you watch or what products do you buy on Amazon? Recca is one-stop shopping for everything.

How do you make money?

Our initial revenue stream is based on affiliate marketing links. Basically, this means that – when possible – we link to websites where you can view and buy the things recommended by other users. If you follow one of these links to another website and make a purchase, the business behind that site may pay us a nominal sum for referring you. This process is completely free to you. Businesses pay us out of their own profit margins for sending more business their way.

This is, in fact, how most review blogs monetize their traffic. Blog editors will write and publish reviews and generate an affiliate link for each product, hoping that you'll click on them and make purchases. These links don't pay that much per referral, so that's why generating a lot of traffic is important.

Recca is a little different from a review blog because we wanted to create a place where everyone had the opportunity to share their favorite things and benefit from the expertise of the community and their friends. Instead of devoting time and effort to writing reviews, we poured it into designing and developing this platform. Much of what we make will probably have to go toward keeping the site running (this is a wee bit more expensive to run than a blog), but we hope to eventually make enough to start paying ourselves too. Until then, I suppose you could call this site a labor of love.

In the future, we have additional plans for monetization. We'd like to thoughtfully consider allowing businesses to place promotional advertising on the site. We also feel that there's a unique opportunity to provide businesses tools for connecting directly with people who recommend them. Finally, we also think that users with large followings may want to monetize their own recommendations, akin to how Patreon enables creators to lock their content behind subscriptions or paywalls.

Does Recca aggregate reviews from other sources?

Nope; there are already plenty of review aggregators out there. Furthermore as discussed above, what we specialize in (recommendations) is pretty different from reviews.

Recommendations on Recca always start with a “prompt” – a purpose-driven question that can be answered by recommending a specific place, business, or product. It's not possible to recommend something on Recca without it answering a prompt. Most reviews, on the other hand, are concerned with the author's general perceptions and usually don't make statements like “This is the best X for Y use case”.

While it'd be straightforward to crawl other sites for reviews and artificially populate our pages, we'd rather focus on quality over quantity. A recommendation on Recca means something and provides value by addressing a real use case. If something doesn't appear on Recca, that says something too, because it means it isn't anyone's first choice yet.

Are you using AI to improve recommendations?

In short, not yet. And it may sound strange, but our vision for Recca is about much more than simply providing the “best” recommendations.

In recent years, the term “recommendation” has been largely co-opted by automated processes and algorithms. Increasingly, everything we use from social media and streaming services will “recommend” us content that they think we will like. And they generally do a good job; I'm one of the believers that data systems can “know” us even better than we know ourselves.

But for a moment, I'd like you to think about the last recommendation you got from a real human. Maybe someone was raving about a great new restaurant or TV show or vacation destination. In that moment, they weren't an unfeeling algorithm shepherding you toward whatever's “trending”. They were sharing a bit of themselves and their experiences with you, and you might have been inspired to share your own stories and recommendations. And even if you took their recommendation and didn't love it, that experience still left you with something to talk about the next time you saw them.

In my mind, therein lies the beauty of real, human recommendations. Their innate power to connect us and allow us to express ourselves as unique and complex individuals with broad interests and storied experiences. So while some other sites may aggregate reviews and leverage AI to generate lists of things they think you will like, I'd rather spend my time (and maybe introduce a bit of AI) connecting you with friends and influencers who want to share their lives with you.

What's next on the Recca roadmap?

We're still early in the journey of building Recca. That said, we feel really good about this first version of the site we're bringing to market. It should hopefully cover enough categories to make each of our user profiles a colorful tapestry of diverse interests and discoveries.

Of course, we're always looking ahead to new features and solutions. Here's a quick list of some irons we've got in the fire:

• Expanded category offerings. We're starting with a lot of categories, but if we're trying to cover the world of possibilities, we've still got a long way to go. I'd like to launch more formal city categories, and to design more color themes for our categories. I also think it'd be interesting to branch into more specific offerings for platforms and retailers, similar to our Amazon categories. Think about recommending products from Home Depot or contractors on Angi or streamers on Twitch.
• Analytics. I think seeing data on how the community is viewing and interacting with your recommendations and user profile is a cool and interesting data point, and I'd like to figure out the best way to expose that to users.
• Interest-oriented forums. Since Recca is all about things we love, there might be value in providing more generalized forums for discussion/Q&A related to the things we're recommending.
• Business tools. Businesses can benefit greatly by appearing on Recca because it means that they're someone's first choice when it comes to answering a prompt. I'd like to partner with businesses to give them the tools to expand their presence on Recca.
• Mobile app. We're web-first for easier accessibility, but there are definite advantages to a mobile app. We'll be pursuing this when time and resources allow.

If you have other ideas for our priorities, please drop me a line at [email protected].